Tag Archives: Disney+

Free Guy

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There’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching a movie that you expected to be, y’know, probably fine, and it turns out to be really good instead. But then again, I think it is also time to acknowledge that Ryan Reynolds, at this stage in his career, is one of those guys who doesn’t make bad movies. Plus, and I’m ranging a bit far afield of my point now, but his acting style is one I have hardly ever seen before. There are the people who vanish into their roles, and the people that are too famous to vanish but still you are impressed by their ability to be two people at once, and the people who are obviously just playing themselves. And then there’s this guy, unique in my memory, who plays himself, but in a funny game of what if. “What if I got to pretend to be Pikachu?” “What if I got to pretend to be Deadpool?” “What if I got to pretend to be an irrepressibly cheerful NPC in a sandbox video game?”

Free Guy is pretty much the movie you expect it to be, at first glance. Guy works at the Bank, which gets robbed several times a day by the People Who Wear the Glasses. Then, after an inciting incident with a girl humming a song, he starts taking control of his own destiny. I like video games, and I like Reynolds, so the premise was enough to get me to watch. But the thing is, the story is written much more thoughtfully than the previews implied, and the result is a timely, occasionally hilarious, and sweet-hearted look at what our games and indeed what our world could someday look like.

The Marvels

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The Marvels marks the first MCU movie that I did not see in a theater. 15 year run, that’s not bad, but still: pretty big sad face emoji. Plus, it makes me irrationally feel responsible for how said movie kind of tanked. (It’s not like I didn’t want to see it. But it pretty much requires a grandparent in town to take over the kids, while the movie is still on its theatrical run. And because of a random illness outbreak, we missed our window.)

I mean, I shouldn’t feel responsible. There’s a pretty obvious culprit for why, and it is how comic book movie fans, painted with a broad brush stroke, are less interested in lady-helmed movies than dude-helmed movies. If you want to make the capitalist argument of “give the people what they want,” well, okay, I can understand that. But I would counter with the artistic argument of “lead from the front.” Anyway, enough about all this. This more important question is, was it good?

The MCU in general has been a mess basically since the credits rolled on Endgame[1]. It’s not quite rudderless. It has been dealing[2] with the aftermath of the Blip. It has been more and more broadly introducing the multiverse, and to a lesser extent it has been waving Kang around as an existential threat. But none of these things have been tied together tightly the way it was done in the old days, when every single movie was part of the whole, whether you knew it in prospect or only in retrospect.

So where do The Marvels fit into all of this? During (let’s say) a deleted scene at the end of Captain Marvel 30 years ago, Carol Danvers took out her aggressions on the Kree Empire’s AI emperor, so the kind of thing that happened to her would never happen to anyone else. Fast forward to the present, where for comic book logic reasons, an existential threat to the intergalactic superhighway has (at a quantum level) entangled Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel (she had a TV show) and Monica Rambeau (she was a secondary character in a different TV show). Also, the threat turns out to have a personal component, because that’s just better writing than if it did not.

So they have to learn to get along, and how to sort out their differences, and how to be successfully introduced to non-TV audiences, while going on a road trip through the galaxy trying to resolve the driving concern of the film. And they do it lady-style! …which sounds like I’m making fun, but seriously, since the dude-style version of this is just a bunch of punching each other, it’s nice to see the alternative.

In the end, a) I liked the movie, and okay I usually do; I’m forgiving of this particular genre and especially universe. But I think it was pretty good. Light and funny in the way I imagine The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to have been, except with lots of punching and explosions[3]. And self-contained, which is a good thing when the attempts to not be self-contained have been so tragic. But b) the MCU at large is still a mess; nothing there has been improved by this movie, it was just a good in itself. And c) really it was more like 90% of a good. All the scenes with Nick Fury’s SABER space station were present for no other reason than to set up 10 minutes of highly gratuitous fan service. I’m not saying those scenes weren’t amusing in the moment, just that boy do they age poorly. (And to be clear, I saw this movie three days ago, which gives you an idea.)

[1] with the sole exception of the Spider–Man movies, and probably because Sony makes them with the approximate assumption that people are watching those three movies and nothing else in the MCU. Which is a bad assumption, but the unintended results cannot be argued. (Also, I’m being unfair to James Gunn here by not mentioning his (also closer to stand-alone) efforts.)
[2] badly. It has been dealing badly with the Blip, because Kevin Feige isn’t willing (or doesn’t know how) to go ahead and make even one movie or one TV show that is more than 10% a drama, and give his characters room to breathe and to grieve. Because that, much like ladies in charge of the movie, won’t put butts in seats. So maybe it’s not entirely Feige’s fault after all, I suppose.
[3] “But you said…” No, right, I know. It’s still a Marvel movie, come on. But they didn’t punch each other! Which is important.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

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Last year, they made another Indiana Jones movie. I know that a lot of people complained about the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull movie, which, wow, was longer ago than I thought. But I think a certain suspension of disbelief is required to watch really any of these movies, and the things I saw at that time were more or less from the perspective of people who had lost their childlike sense of wonder about watching a pulp-inspired movie, and thought the sequel should have grown up with them. All of which to say, if you didn’t like that, you probably won’t like this. (If you simply thought it was weaker than some of the other movies in the series, this one is stronger again, for sure.)

Which brings us to 1969 and the latest (last?) sequel, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The veracity of the plot is somewhat less than that of the other Indy movies involving Nazis, while still having more basis in fact than you’d expect from a pulp movie in general. See, there’s this fancy gear/dial thingy that predicts events based on prior knowledge, called an antikythera. The movie inaccurately(?) attributes its invention to Archimedes, who to be fair is a pretty cool dude, on par with your Da Vincis and your Teslas as far as coming up with fancy ideas (and perhaps executing them).

Everything else can be derived from first principles. Will there be an exciting chase sequence in which the upper hand changes direction multiple times? Will the Nazis deserve to have their faces melted off? Will there be glorified tomb-raiding, complete with traps and bugs and snakes and whatnot? Are there unexpected twists? Will it belong in a museum? (Yes, yes because it’s an odd-numbered movie, more or less yes, obviously yes, and, well, yes.)

Cars

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The boy has been watching Cars practically nonstop for the past four months. (Six?) But I didn’t ever sit down and watch it myself until this week. Common wisdom is that it’s a ripoff of Doc Hollywood, which would be easier to comment on if I, uh, remembered almost anything about that movie. I mean, the broad strokes, yes, in that a hotshot racecar|doctor learns that small town life is worthwhile and also falls in love. But I think I should be able to speak at a little more depth than that, to confirm or deny.

Anyway, at the end of the day, Pixar or not, it’s a kid movie, and unless maybe if you also are really into stock car racing (which I am not), it does not surpass its origins in the way that, say, parts of Up did. But it’s good enough to watch when his eyes light up like that, even if I think he should be watching Star Wars instead.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

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It’s impossible to think about a sequel to Black Panther without thinking about Chadwick Boseman. I don’t mean because he died, or I don’t only mean that. I mean that every aspect of the movie’s plot is wholly informed by the fact of his loss. I try to imagine a movie with any shared plot point but also T’Challa is the main character, and… I just cannot.

Instead of whatever might have been, we got one of the grimmest MCU movies I can remember, in which a series of unlikable politicians face off against[1] an unlikable Queen Ramonda[2] faces off against the goddamned Submariner.

I want to have more to say, but… I kind of don’t. Wakanda Forever ended up feeling like exactly the movie it was, in which the MCU architects were forced to spend an entire movie shifting around pieces on the chess board to explain why there’s still a Black Panther even though the actor died and they were smart enough to not replace him in the same role with a new actor.

The best part of the movie was the payoff of that conundrum, where the most deserving justification and the most deserving character came together very neatly to solve the problem and save the day. The second best part of the movie was that they managed to convince me Namor’s ankle wings are not entirely ridiculous in every way, via Mayan mythology. The second worst part of the movie is that I think if Boseman had lived, we would not have gotten the goddamned Submariner into the MCU yet, or maybe ever. (The worst part of the movie is that Chadwick Boseman died, of course. Even if it happened before they settled the script.)

[1] Because, see, they want vibranium, and there’s no longer a Black Panther to protect Wakanda. (I mean, there’s still piles of Wakandan futuretech and those badass Dora Milaje, which you’d think would be plenty enough to give anyone pause.)
[2] A lot of the time, she[3] has good reason to be angry. But she’s just not nice to anyone, and it definitely adds to the grim feel of things.
[3] T’Challa’s mother, the new ruler of the nation since he had to be written out of the story.

Thor: Love and Thunder

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The fourth Thor movie came out in, what, July? We went to see it at the drive-in, and it was good enough in an actiony explosions and rainbosenberg bridges kind of way. Also, like always, I was tired and it was a summer movie, which means starting near sunset for two (and a half, counting previews, etc) hours is a lot later than if we were watching it in, say, February. So I lightly dozed through a lot of it, which caused me to judge what I did see perhaps more harshly than I would have otherwise. This doesn’t matter to you, because I was always going to watch it again for real before writing a review, which not incidentally is why this one is six months late. But it did mean I kept putting it off even though it’s been available to me for multiple months via certain online sources run by mice.

Thor: Love and Thunder has two glaring flaws, the first of which is sort of a spoiler but not especially. So, one of all, he went off with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame. But now he has his own movie. and also, they have their own movie soon. So the possibilities are that these movies a) tie into each other in some way, b) are lopsided because Thor is sharing screen time with a whole team but then isn’t in their movie at all when it comes out later, or c) are wholly unrelated, and the team and thunder god have to be uncoupled. C is bad because it means them going off together in the first place was pointless and poorly thought out, with no planning. You can guess which one happened, I trust.

Two of all, the movie itself is… I am about to say it’s pointless, which is only true insofar as the context of the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe has previously worked makes it true. It adds nothing to an overarching storyline being told in its Phase or in its collection of phases. Or if it does, what it is adding is entirely opaque. And what occurs to me is that neither of these is a flaw of the movie itself. It is a flaw in how Marvel and apparently Kevin Feige are meandering aimlessly from one plot to the next, with practically no connective tissue. This doesn’t bother me in the comics because the comics started out that way and, despite crossing over with each other frequently, rarely have giant events. Whereas the MCU was one enormous event from start to end[game]. But they can’t come out and say, hey, we’re going full comics, just making these for funsies with occasional big events (but of course regular crossovers), as it would piss the public off, after what they got out of the first ten years. But they also can’t not say it, because then it looks like this, with people hating on most of your movies because they don’t make overall sense. Which, of course they don’t, if you didn’t write in any overall sense to be made!

Either that, or Feige got infected by whatever happened when Disney contracted the third Star Wars trilogy without a plan.

Anyway, all of that to say: this was a good movie, as long as you did not have grand scheme expectations. Waititi has the same sense of whimsical fun that made Ragnarok work so well, and if it was maybe amped up a little higher, that worked for me. (I understand why it wouldn’t have worked for everyone.) Hemsworth is having the time of his life, clearly. Various callsback in miniature scattered throughout gave me exactly what I’m also getting from reading all of the comics, and in summation, I’m not tired of what they’re doing yet.

But I do wish they were more certain of what that is, or else that they’d communicate it clearly if they are. The movies are good on a case by case basis, but the overall look is just not very good, you know?

Oh, plot thing, if you need it: a bro with a religious axe to grind gets a magic god-killing sword and starts, er, killing gods. Later, he kidnaps a bunch of Asgardian children, which sends Thor and also Thor (you had to be there) on a quest to stop him from killing those children maybe and still more gods definitely. Also, there are some pretty sweet goats and really a lot of Guns ‘n Roses. And, as you can perhaps envision from the title, a love story.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

After recently rewatching the other two Narnia movies[1], I have now proceeded to watch for the first time The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This was one of young me’s favorite books, in retrospect because of how it involves episodic exploration of unknown parts in which random events occur. Examples: captured for slavery! found invisible monsters with weird tracks! cursed dragon hoard!

And I guess what I think is, without a cohesive throughline, that’s a bad look for a movie? Because “we’re sailing to the edge of the world and also looking for some lords who went this way before, because of some plot thing or other with green mist that frankly none of us[2] can be bothered to really remember well” is not a cohesive throughline. But it’s a perfect long-form episodic throughline, where you talk about the so-called main plot for maybe five minutes every other episode but mainly focus on the island of the week.

As far as the nuts and bolts of the movie… Aslan: mainly around to tell Lucy she should like herself for herself instead of wanting to be glamorous and older, and to take all the credit for making Eustace[3] a better person, even though let’s be real, it was finally having a friend that turned him around. Because Reepicheep is the best mouse, is what. But despite an interlude about heaven and who deserves to be there and when, the Christian trappings of this movie were… no, I’m doing this wrong. Christian trappings were all over the place, but at the expense of any actually useful Jesus values like forgiveness and loving your neighbor.

Ugh. Christian trappings. Goddammit.[4]

[1] They’re… not great. Like, my reviews might speak well of them? My counterpoint is “seeing this book for the first time on a screen” is its own special thing that takes away from noticing that it’s still only okay. And here I refer only to the first one. The second one is nowhere near as good as that.
[2] Okay, maybe me more than them. I would normally here say, well, maybe I was just too busy with work to pay attention. But I watch really a lot of TV and a good number of movies while working, and actually keeping up with the main plot has never been a problem before. So there’s a decent chance that the lack of new sequel was for a good reason.
[3] Eustace is a Pevensie cousin who is a right twit, until later when he is improved by the power of Narnia. If Aslan wanted to teach a Pevensie a lesson, it should have been teaching Edmund that, you know what, you were a right twit once upon a time too, so maybe cut a bro some slack? But CS Lewis is more offended by girls who want to use make-up and date than he is by toxic masculinity, and so here we are.
[4] get it?

Mulan (1998)

Upon request, I have also watched OD[1] Mulan, and I have thoughts. Sort of.

One thing I think is that I’m missing a lot of context. Not only did I just watch the live-action remake, but I also live in a post-Frozen world, where Disney is going out of their way to be empowering, or at least egalitarian, in their gender politics. So Mulan marching off to war to [spoilers upcoming for a 20+ year old movie] become a war hero who at no point needs anyone to rescue her is pretty groundbreaking for a Disney who started off with main character “princesses” who never even took actions, much less actions to improve their own lives. My point is, context matters and this was probably a bigger deal of a movie in 1998 than it seems to me now. Which is good! I would be much less happy if it felt groundbreaking today.

Another thing I thing is, man, Disney musicals are hit or miss. And this one, musically? Mostly missed for me. Some of the songs were really bad, and almost none of them made any lasting impact on me. The two that rose above that included one that was also cringeworthy. I mean, it was supposed to be, but that didn’t really help? Oh well. That said, the further into the story I got, the fewer songs there were. So that part was helpful!

Lastly, I have comparative thoughts, which are these: I’m really grateful to this movie for existing, because the remake took every good thing about the original, processed and refined it into something that was purely better. The problems I had with the live-action version were directly a result of the movie feeling like a real historical document, as opposed to the animated Disney version of a folk legend. In folk legends, you can believe in people doing the right thing, just because it’s right. It’s harder in real life, and my point is, the remake felt real. I’m not sure Disney could have pulled that off without their own template to pull from. It’s not just “What if one of our old movies, but live action?” that Beauty and the Beast was. It really is its own new thing.

As for this? It’s alright, you know? And I like it when Ming-Na Wen is a badass, even if I can only hear her.

[1] Original Disney

Frozen II

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I am legitimately confused to report that I never reviewed Frozen[1]. I mean, I saw it. I even remember that where I saw it was at Laylah’s old house in San Marcos, maybe the spring after it came out? I liked it well enough, not that whether I loved or hated it ought to have influenced my intent to write a review. And the thing is, I was counting on that review to help me with this one, for what I trust are obvious reasons.

See, I liked Frozen II. I have said elsewhere that it is probably the best sequel Disney has ever made, and also that this is damning with faint praise[2]. It’s just that… I guess I just wasn’t there for the plot? It was fine, it just didn’t grab me. And in the meantime, the characters and situation were less subversive, the running joke about Kristoff’s [spoiler] was more humiliation cringe humor than actually funny to me, and the music was nowhere near the instant ubiquitous genius of the original.

I will say that Kristoff’s ’80s power ballad and the first big number in which Anna’s lyrics combined with the external events to create an instance of Greek chorus levels of foreshadowing rarely seen in modern cinema? Those were pretty great.

[1] Here I refer to the Disney movie, not the ski lift horror movie, which I did review.
[2] Fight me. Or at least, tell me an actually good Disney sequel, and here I am explicitly disallowing properties that they have purchased elsewhere. It only counts if it’s a legitimate Disney style of movie. The previous best sequel holder was one of the two Aladdin sequels, probably? I forget which.